In Too Afraid to Ask, we’re answering food-related questions which will or might not provide you with goosebumps. Immediately: What’s avocado hand?
Alanna Clarke was making breakfast at a pal’s house when it occurred. It was fall 2022, and the 32-year-old, Paris-based enterprise advisor was chopping a plump avocado. Clarke was chatting along with her pal whereas eradicating the pit with “a really sharp Swiss knife” when she distractedly “rammed” it via the buttery flesh and into her left palm, proper between the index and center fingers. “I totally collapsed onto the kitchen ground,” she tells me. Clarke had severed a nerve and bought hand surgical procedure the following day.
It’s no secret that avocados have risen to superfood stardom over the previous decade. Retail gross sales of avocados within the US amounted to $2.7 billion in 2022, up from $1.1 billion in 2014. Sadly, although, it’s not all picturesque grain bowls and plush guacamole on the market. Accidents like Clarke’s are actually so commonplace that they’ve earned a particular time period: “avocado hand,” which describes the stab wounds and lacerations sustained whereas slicing or pitting avocados.
Over the previous few years, researchers have penned numerous medical papers on the phenomenon. And avocado hand has transmuted from kitchen oopsie to professional supply of concern for surgeons. In some circumstances the cuts “may be pretty extreme,” says Mary Elizabeth Rashid, MD, a hand surgeon at Nice Plains Orthopedics in Peoria, Illinois, who’s seen avocado-induced accidents “persistently” over the previous a number of years. And in some circumstances, like Clarke’s, the implications may be critical.
How widespread is avocado hand?
Avocado hand must be one of the vital mockable accidents. Are you able to think about displaying as much as the ER bleeding and clutching your hand dramatically, then admitting to a medical skilled that…an avocado dunnit? So many victims really feel this disgrace. “It’s such an embarrassing damage,” says Delaney Vetter, a public relations specialist, who stabbed her hand in school. “I prepare dinner quite a bit so it was further dangerous for my ego.” No Meat Required writer Alicia Kennedy even has a everlasting, taunting reminder of her avocado slip: “a smiley face scar on my left ring finger,” she says.
In 2020, researchers at Emory College branded avocado hand an “epidemic.” They’d estimated that fifty,413 avocado-related knife accidents occurred between 1998 and 2017, with a 40% enhance between 2013 and 2017. (And people figures don’t embody the individuals too mortified to hunt assist.)
Sadly for me, avocado hand strikes millennial girls the toughest. Of the circumstances the Emory College researchers studied, 80.1% of sufferers have been girls and practically half of them have been aged between 23 and 39. The rise in circumstances, they famous, nearly completely correlates to the rise in avocado consumption within the US. A examine from the Hass Avocado Board additionally discovered that the common millennial spent $24.99 on avocados in 2018 (5 p.c greater than non-millennials).
